The game is fun, it delivers what the demo and the trailers promised. The coalition mechanic was a big surprise, although the last fight with the can't see opponents moves character was kinda a guessing game. I also learned the value of using the last turn to stock up on political capital.

I am really having fun with this, if you enjoy prime minister's questions and the idea of surviving in political office game this hits that vibe

Presentation is excellent, the art and animations are far above most card style games, it is very smooth just has good design overall. Like at the end of each debate, the speaker calls it then all MPs jump down into a spotlit room and vote its just cool

The game is split into 2 main parts, the bulk of the game is the debates, it is similar to slay the spire etc but instead of health pools, you are fighting over MPs votes to pass your law. Different opposition parties are made up of different monsters, which play a little differently.
The debates are cool and have some rate curveballs, one time the opposition straight up sneakily murdered one of my MPs during a debate and the speaker didn't notice so he got away with it

The rest of the game is a resource management game, where you make desicions on how to react to world events, who to hire into your party etc. All of these impact several resources - money, reputation, political capital, and voting intentions at the polls.

I did enjoy the resource management & decisions which came through for how to react to different things, the writing is good. The decisions you make often come back to haunt you during your debates where you receive a memo and are told that for example the olympics that you underfunded earlier caused a stadium to fall down and you now have to decide whether to immediately pledge money to fix it or use capital to blame the opponent - there is loads like that, I would say most decisions you make are not one note, and come back again some form.

This is not a political simulator, if you go in expectation to be able to form your dream political party like democracy 4 you won't get that - it is more a political survival game which is fun

After every few debates there is an election which you need to be popular enough to survive.


In the first run, it is quite east on the starting difficulty - I found my moveset had more synergy and is stronger than almost all of my cards now so I find myself doing the same combination of moves all the time.
This might change up in higher difficulties or maybe I got lucky so will reserve judgement on that.

**EDIT**
Having now played longer and hit higher difficulty, the game does force you to change up your playstyle in certain debates, I had an aggressive playstyle with the vampire and ended up against a skeleton shadow chancellor opponent who countered attacks - I needed a unity playstyle to beat him but hadn't switched up ahead fo the debate so got obliterated. You are free to change all your moveset (tactics) ahead of each debate, I could have swapped my moveset to a unity based one and won. There are others opponents like this such as the scarecrow who repeatedly removes your positive status effects, so counters builds based on them.
Considering that the moveset (tactics) are a large part of the kit and can be swapped around between debates allows you to really change up your game before each one, unlike slay the spire where you can't meaningfully change your deck between fights. So that is a big positive and I think will become more pronounced on higher difficulty.

I did really enjoy a moment where there was an assassination attempt on me which removed one of my move slots forcing me to adapt and change up my style. I also appreciated that the assassination attempt was animated rather than just a popup like most political games . Overall I am having good fun, and the main the game can benefit from is more curveballs and forced ways to change up your style


Having great fun overall, a very cool game where you must win debates, survive votes and make lots of decisions

If I could, I would give this game a neutral review. It's not bad, but it didn't really impress me either. If you played the demo and you were extremely pleased with what you saw then it's probably worth a buy, but otherwise the full game isn't really that much deeper than what featured in the demo.

THE GOOD

1. The core gameplay loop is good. There's a solid foundation here, and the mechanics all work well.

2. The presentation of the game is very nice. The sound effects, the character designs and animations, all good stuff. It's nothing amazing or anything, but it's good.

3. The writing is pretty good. Especially for a Br*tish game, the humour and cultural references are well done. Probably nothing that's going to leave you gasping for air and slapping your knees, but it's good enough.

THE BAD

1. While solid, the core gameplay loop seems to get old pretty quickly. The fact that you can't really change or customise your deck all that much in a "deck-building" game is especially egregious. You can upgrade your cards, but upgrading them doesn't really change their effect that much, and there are only two different choices per card. On top of that, the number of "tactics" (basically passive or active abilities, kind of like "relics" from Slay the Spire) that you can field at one time is very limited. Because of that, after a certain point I'm not really excited to be gaining new tactics because I already have a build worked out and I can't add anymore, so most of them just collect dust. This leads to each individual "fight" (debate) feeling more or less the same outside of whatever gimmick the enemy has access to that I either have to try and counter or just power through.

2. There's no real "politics" in this political game. I know that's not really the focus, and I wasn't expecting much going in, but given how shallow I found the gameplay mechanics I was secretly hoping the cloak-and-dagger side of the game might make up for it. Not really. The world of "politics" in this game mostly exists as a contrivence to either help or hinder you in some way, putting barriers or choices in front of you and then increasing or decreasing your resources. There's no real ideologies, no political parties (outside of the fake ones the game creates that opponents are arbitrarily assigned to) and no reason to take any of these decisions seriously outside of whether they grant X or Y resource and which of the two you prefer. On some ocassions certain decisions will crop back up again later depending on how you chose to resolve them, but again it's just more of the same thing where they drain X or Y resource and that's about it. It's a functional system, but that's about it. There's not a lot of fun to be had or any particular reason to think about any of these decisions at all.

Again, I didn't really hate it, but I've played a fair number of card games and this one didn't really impress me. If you've already clocked Slay the Spire 2 and you're desperate for something to scratch that itch this will probably do it for you, but otherwise I'd give it a soft pass.